“Who says so?” I asked, snapping off the flashlight, moving over close to a side wall.
“A whole goldurned flock of deputy sheriffs,” the voice answered.
“Couldn’t you push one of ’em in and let us get a look at him?” I asked. “I’ve been choked and carved and shot at tonight until I haven’t got much faith left in anybody’s word.”
A lanky, knock-kneed man with a thin leathery face appeared in the doorway. He showed me a buzzer, I fished out my credentials, and the other deputies came in. There were three of them in all.
“We were driving down the road bound for a little job near the point when we heard the shooting,” the lanky one explained. “What’s up?”
I told him.
“This shack’s been empty a long while,” he said when I had finished. “Anybody could have camped in it easy enough. Think it was that Papadopoulos, huh? We’ll kind of look around for him and his friends—especial since there’s that nice reward money.”
We searched the woods and found nobody. The man I had knocked down and the man I had shot were both gone.
Jack and I rode back to Sausalito with the deputies. I hunted up a doctor there and had my back bandaged. He said the cut was long but shallow. Then we returned to San Francisco and separated in the direction of our homes.
And thus ended the day’s doings.